The laptop that caused all this shit was from 2019. Not "ancient" but not exactly "new" either, and the issue was because Windows Update did an auto-update to Windows 11 and decided my mom didn't need her computer to boot anymore. When I walked them through flashing Windows 11 onto a flash drive (using a stock Windows 11 image using Microsoft's own flashing tools) and installing it manually it worked fine, so it was specifically Windows Update that broke things, not Windows 11 itself.
I've had updates break Linux and cause things to not boot anymore, and those aren't fun, but generally fixing it boils down to rebooting to a previous snapshot [1], or logging in with the command line running like three commands.
I did try fixing the computer before we nuked it. I tried walking them through the Windows auto repair, which didn't do anything (but at least it took a long time), and I tried booting into safe mode, but it wouldn't get any farther than the regular boot did. Apparently there is a way to get into a Powershell live-boot (though I didn't know this at the time), so maybe I could have fixed it with that, anything is possible, but ultimately my solution was getting the to flash a live USB of Ubuntu, and I then mounted the drive and rsync'd everything to my server.
[1] Because Microsoft still doesn't have Copy on Write (despite being a proven and more than 20 year old bit of tech) and so they can't do good snapshotting.
I've had updates break Linux and cause things to not boot anymore, and those aren't fun, but generally fixing it boils down to rebooting to a previous snapshot [1], or logging in with the command line running like three commands.
I did try fixing the computer before we nuked it. I tried walking them through the Windows auto repair, which didn't do anything (but at least it took a long time), and I tried booting into safe mode, but it wouldn't get any farther than the regular boot did. Apparently there is a way to get into a Powershell live-boot (though I didn't know this at the time), so maybe I could have fixed it with that, anything is possible, but ultimately my solution was getting the to flash a live USB of Ubuntu, and I then mounted the drive and rsync'd everything to my server.
[1] Because Microsoft still doesn't have Copy on Write (despite being a proven and more than 20 year old bit of tech) and so they can't do good snapshotting.